Obamacare help line told customers passwords were reset in error

HHS says that a bogus script for support call center operators was to blame.

Apparently, the contractors running the Department of Health and Human Services' HealthCare.gov website did not reset customer passwords this week. According to CNN, HHS officials now say that call center operators for the website's help line were erroneously given scripts that mentioned the password reset.

People trying to register for health insurance through the site were being told as late as Thursday morning that the reason they were unable to log into their accounts on HealthCare.gov was because of a system-wide password reset, as Ars reported on Tuesday. But an HHS representative told CNN, "A wrong script was provided to call center representatives. It's been corrected. The wrong script was read for only a short time—just this morning."

Ars attempted to contact HHS officials on Tuesday for comment, but a spokesperson at the Center for Medicare Services, which oversees the program, could not provide a comment. Still, it's clear from reports from individuals who spoke with HealthCare.gov's Advanced Response Center—the call center responsible for customer issues elevated beyond the initial help desk line—that the ARC was telling people that passwords had been reset much earlier than Thursday morning.

Seems it was a political move to require a full registration first, as HHS wanted people to be able to see their subsidies, not just the raw premiums. Well, if you want a subsidy estimate, go here: http://kff.org/interactive/subsidy-calculator/

I'm really not sure what's going on at this point. My wife made an account before the website opened and verified she could log in. Ever since it launched on the 1st she can't log in, it says her credentials are invalid. We have tried to do the password reset multiple times and it doesn't work. She gets the email, but when she clicks on the link it just says "We weren't able to process your request because we couldn't find a Marketplace profile that matched the information that you provided."

I tried to register an account after it opened and I never received a verification email and I am not able to log in either.

I did try the online chat and they said they never saw that problem and to call the help line, which we have not done yet. I am not sure if this is a system-wide issue or something happened with her account?

All things considered, this is a way more stable launch than SimCity or Diablo 3 were.

I could at least sign into Diablo III on launch day, and it worked, with no delays. It took several hours to get Healthcare.gov to where I could register; another 9 days to where I could sign in; and I still can't actually apply, so it doesn't qualify as "working" yet.

It was a joke mostly. I didn't have these issues because when I logged in, it forwarded me to my state's insurance exchange which has been running for years.

The analogy is still valid, however. A ton of people logging into a site all at once is going to break an awful lot of things. This should have been billed as a beta, with a gradual rollout based on social security number, but then they would have bitched because obviously the government can't handle such an undertaking. There is no way for them to win.

Wow! It's almost like launching a highly complicated multi-agency spanning IT project to tip the spear of the most significant re-alignment of national healthcare priorities in decades under a political climate so toxic that some are actively pursing a scorched-earth policy to default on US debt is bound to have a very difficult birthing process and journalists should rouse themselves from their usual laziness and try to offer even the faintest amount of context to go with all the usual sexy bad news.

It's sadly ironic that contractors are brought in to do a better job more cheaply than civil servants but when the contractors are more incompetent and more expensive than the people they're supposed to replace, civil servants still get the blame.

Why would they even have a script ready saying all passwords were being reset? Were they anticipating giving subscribers a hassle in the future, or were there plans for a hacker breach in the headlines?

As someone who has worked for a major BPO for years, I can understand. It should reflect only on the people providing the information.

The phone agents are guaranteed to be in the dark. At some point, someone at their site said, "We need to get a script out to the agents" because of the massive influx of calls, and someone from the contracted center came up with something without knowing the full story.

The biggest downfall of any customer service is not communicating with the front line agents. It makes the agents look bad for just trying to do their job, and it makes whoever they're working for look even worse.

The federal site is not working. It took about 5 working days and about 20 tries to getting a working(?) account. Every time I "successfully" log in I get a blank page - no text, no images, no vides, etc.

Seems it was a political move to require a full registration first, as HHS wanted people to be able to see their subsidies, not just the raw premiums. Well, if you want a subsidy estimate, go here: http://kff.org/interactive/subsidy-calculator/

Playing with calculator leads me to conclude that Obamacare will be financial disaster for many Americans who have been lead to believe they would have subsidized coverage.

I was still told just tonight that all the accounts were reset and that I needed to reset my password. I went to reset mine, and got the reset e-mail, but after answering my security questions (which it accepted no problem), and creating a new password, I was told that it my information did not match any account.

JoshV: Thank you for that link. I was finally able to get the information I was looking for. It's shameful that they don't even point you to that page when you ask for something exactly like it, especially when I'm not looking to sign up (already have excellent coverage through my job), but wanted to be able better informed.

Regardless of one's political affiliations or feelings of the PPACA, seeing as the original estimate was apparently $93.7 million and the final cost was $634 million, can we at least agree that the way these contracts are handed out is corrupt, broken, and needs to be changed? I'd love it if "If you promise cost X and we give you the contract, anything above X, you are going to pay us back, and we get our money back if you back out" contracts existed, but I can't see that not having horrible unintended consequences, like unforeseen issues destroying lots of jobs on a big project when a company is ruined. Plus with the way things work in Washington, fat chance of that happening.

Near as I can tell the problem I'm having is on Experien's end. I can log in just fine, but I"m continually told that my identity can't be verified even after I've both called them and scanned and sent them a copy of my ID. It's annoying, but I'll try back in two weeks, if I can't sign up by next month, then I'll get annoyed. Not like signing up day one gets insurance any faster. Anyone who signs up between October 1st and December 15th will have their coverage begin on January 1st.

By shutting down the government and focusing a lot of media attention on the Republicans holding themselves hostage, they are simultaneously helping to bury a major blunder by Obama's administration AND giving him a convenient scapegoat for the failures.

Regardless of one's political affiliations or feelings of the PPACA, seeing as the original estimate was apparently $93.7 million and the final cost was $634 million, can we at least agree that the way these contracts are handed out is corrupt, broken, and needs to be changed? I'd love it if "If you promise cost X and we give you the contract, anything above X, you are going to pay us back, and we get our money back if you back out" contracts existed, but I can't see that not having horrible unintended consequences, like unforeseen issues destroying lots of jobs on a big project when a company is ruined. Plus with the way things work in Washington, fat chance of that happening.

I don't know about you, but if I'm a corporate manager, there is no way in hell I would ever accept those terms. It'd be a tightrope walk across the Grand Canyon in the middle of hurricane.

Regardless of one's political affiliations or feelings of the PPACA, seeing as the original estimate was apparently $93.7 million and the final cost was $634 million, can we at least agree that the way these contracts are handed out is corrupt, broken, and needs to be changed? I'd love it if "If you promise cost X and we give you the contract, anything above X, you are going to pay us back, and we get our money back if you back out" contracts existed, but I can't see that not having horrible unintended consequences, like unforeseen issues destroying lots of jobs on a big project when a company is ruined. Plus with the way things work in Washington, fat chance of that happening.

I don't know about you, but if I'm a corporate manager, there is no way in hell I would ever accept those terms. It'd be a tightrope walk across the Grand Canyon in the middle of hurricane.

Sure you would. The government has a massive amount of buying power. You'll accept the terms, or you'll lose half your demand base.

If you can't access your exchange, it is your own state's fault. They ceded management to the federales.

The feds are the one who shoved the individual mandate through by abusing the interstate commerce clause; in doing so, they took responsibility for running the exchanges. There is zero justification to offload any responsibility to my state.

I see that contracting everything out to the lowest bidder has screwed things up again.

Actually, from personal experience it's almost always due to the government regulations that software developers have to abide by. There are so many programmatic processes, certifications, and accreditations that IT systems have to get in order to be deemed operationally sound by the government that getting anything done is a herculean effort. Hell, the system I worked for up until about two months ago is STILL on windows XP, even though we recommended updating more than two years ago. They're finally building the images to update the systems, but they won't be delivered until Q2 next year! And don't even bother talking about switching over to linux, that OS scares the hell out of the people who have to make the decisions, usually over things like personnel training and interoperability.

Regardless of one's political affiliations or feelings of the PPACA, seeing as the original estimate was apparently $93.7 million and the final cost was $634 million, can we at least agree that the way these contracts are handed out is corrupt, broken, and needs to be changed? I'd love it if "If you promise cost X and we give you the contract, anything above X, you are going to pay us back, and we get our money back if you back out" contracts existed, but I can't see that not having horrible unintended consequences, like unforeseen issues destroying lots of jobs on a big project when a company is ruined. Plus with the way things work in Washington, fat chance of that happening.

The integrators for the contract I used to work on were on an FFP contract. It usually means that there are a lot of compromises in the end, but the job basically gets done. And as far as I know, all contracts have a clause about not getting paid for backing out. I have yet to see a contractor back out of a contract, since that would be a death sentence on their ability to bid on contracts. What usually happens is companies don't bid on the next iteration of the contract once they do their cost analysis.

I don't know if the developers for the federal exchanges are/were on an FFP, but if they were I'd guess that a lot of their problems stemmed from both regulatory requirements and underestimating costs. Usually the second one happens because people don't take into consideration that the government processes for handling things like Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and Certification and Accreditation (C&A), as well as adhering to things like the Clinger-Cohen Act (CCA) are extremely onerous and just getting through the steps required to start having engineering meetings is ridiculous.

Regardless of one's political affiliations or feelings of the PPACA, seeing as the original estimate was apparently $93.7 million and the final cost was $634 million, can we at least agree that the way these contracts are handed out is corrupt, broken, and needs to be changed? I'd love it if "If you promise cost X and we give you the contract, anything above X, you are going to pay us back, and we get our money back if you back out" contracts existed, but I can't see that not having horrible unintended consequences, like unforeseen issues destroying lots of jobs on a big project when a company is ruined. Plus with the way things work in Washington, fat chance of that happening.

Why didn't the private insurers, who are to reap the benefits of all the new customers, pay for the web site development?

If this were a commercial insurance company that did this, Al Franken would be immediately and publicly calling them out and making speeches decrying this so-serious error. My prediction is that he'll be silent on this one, though.

Seems it was a political move to require a full registration first, as HHS wanted people to be able to see their subsidies, not just the raw premiums. Well, if you want a subsidy estimate, go here: http://kff.org/interactive/subsidy-calculator/

Playing with calculator leads me to conclude that Obamacare will be financial disaster for many Americans who have been lead to believe they would have subsidized coverage.

You missed a few points.

1) Those of us who don't qualify for a subsidy are included in that "financial disaster" path due to dramatically increased premiums.2) The premiums and subsidies don't include the increase in deductable and yearly max out of pocket expense

It's sadly ironic that contractors are brought in to do a better job more cheaply than civil servants but when the contractors are more incompetent and more expensive than the people they're supposed to replace, civil servants still get the blame.

Who do you think hires, supervises, and pays those incompetent contractors?